BeeCon ’16 – Hands on about Content Intelligence with AAAR

2016-04-17Francesco Corti

In this post is described the tasks of the Hands On session about ContentIntelligence with AAAR, for the BeeCon ’16 in Brussels. During the BeeCon Hans On Session, a real scenario about analytics on Alfresco is used with custom reports, dashboards and Pivot tables. Below the complete description of the session, starting from the preparation of the environment to the development of the exercises on reports, dashboards and OLAP analysis.

Before diving in the description of the session, let me thank the Pentaho guys and girls (in particular Pedro Alves, Pedro Vale and the Marketing Office) for the sponsorship of the BeeCon and the gadgets sent for the attendees of the hands on session (and the BeeCon in general).

Installing Pentaho with AAAR on board

Open a terminal and run start-pentaho script from Biserver folder. During the startup, a question at command line will be requested. Press Enter to proceed with Pentaho Server startup.

From here ahead, remember to always check <biserver>/tomcat/logs/catalina.out for further details about Pentaho and AAAR execution (and issues).

After a couple of minutes, open a browser to the URL below.

http://localhost:8081/pentaho

Use admin user with password password.

Now that Pentaho is running, it’s time to add the AAAR datasource in the way you see in the screenshots below. To access to the form, click on File > Manage Data Sources from the Pentaho User Console, and then click on the cogwheel and then to New connection.

To make the setup easier, you can copy the settings directly from the description below.

Name:

AAAR_DataMart

Database type:

Generic database

URL:

jdbc:h2:tcp:localhost:9092/AAAR_DataMart

Driver class name:

org.h2.Driver

User name:

pentaho_user

Password:

password

Installing DBVisualizer (optional)

Do you have a DB client into your environment?
If not, you can install DBVisualizer from the distro.

If you are working with a Linux Operating System, execute the command below.

./dbvis_linux_9_2_15.sh

If you are working with a Mac/Windows Operating System, extract the package (tgz/zip) somewhere in your hard drive.

dbvis is the executable to launch.

To configure DBVisualizator for AAAR, see the screenshots below as configuration. Please remember that Pentaho must be started otherwise the database is not available.

Put your hands on AAAR

Now that the Pentaho + AAAR environment is ready, let’s put the hands on the Content Intelligence tasks. In the distro package (or into the virtual machine) you can find the Analytics folder containing the source code of several exercises.

Hands on n.1 – Reports in several formats

Inside the Reports folder you can find several files with a prpt extention.
Each file is a Pentaho Report, developed with Pentaho Report Designer.
Let’s view the reports about audits, documents and workflows, published into Pentaho.
To view the report, follow the steps described below:

Open the Pentaho repository, from the Pentaho User Console, pressing the Browse button.

Select the /Public path.

Upload the prpt files into the path.

Open them using the Open link.

You can view and download the report in several formats (PDF, XLSX, TXT, etc.)

Below a preview of the report.

Hands on n.2 – Dashboards

Inside the Dashboards folder you can find three files with a common name AAAR_hands_on and different extension (cda, cdfde, wcdf).
All the three files define a Pentaho Dashboard in CDE format.
By default the dashboard describes a bar chart presenting the creation dates of the contracts of Use Case n.1 of the speech about Content Intelligence.

Let’s view the dashboard published into Pentaho.
To view the dashboard, follow the steps described below:

Open the Pentaho repository, from the Pentaho User Console, pressing the Browse button.

Select the /Public path.

Upload the three files with name AAAR_hands_on into the path.

Open the AAAR_hands_on file with the blu icon, using the Open link.

You can interact with the dashboard changing the filters.

Below a preview of the dashboard where we will start to work.

Hands on n.3 – Pivot tables about audits and documents

Inside the Pivot tables folder you can find two files named AAAR_AuditTrail.xml and AAAR_Repository.xml. The two files defines two OLAP HyperCubes: the first on the audit trail, the second on the documents/folders of the repository.

To use the OLAP Hypercubes with Pentaho, you need to install Saiku Analytics from the Pentaho marketplace. In the distro you will find it already installed, but you have to activate it with a (free) community license requested directly to the developer of the software (Meteorite license portal).

To use the hypercubes, follow the steps described below:

Add the AAAR datasource in the way you see in the screenshots below.

Create a new Saiku analytics clicking on File > New > Saiku Analytics from the Pentaho User Console.